1. art and entertainment
2. music
3. music genres
4. punk

‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’
– 4–
‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’ Or Here’s Three
Chords, Now Form a Band: Punk, Masochism,
Skin, Anaclisis, Defacement
David Bloustien
One night I wandered into a rock-n-roll club named CBGB’s . . . Boomp boomp
boomp entered my feet. Boomp boomp boomp entered my head. My body split into
two bodies. I was the new world. I was pounding. Then there was these worms of
bodies, white, covered by second-hand stinking guttered-up rags and knife-torn
leather bands, moving sideways HORIZONTAL wriggling like worms who never
made it to the snake-evolution stage, we only reproduce, we say, if you cut us apart
with a knife.
(Acker 1984: 120)
Torn clothes and bondage pants, pierced skin and leather clothing continue to be
ubiquitous symbols of punk in the popular imagination, and there is certainly no
lack of empirical evidence to locate the paraphernalia of masochism in punk design
and cultural production. Musical genealogies of American punk performance often
begin with the Velvet Underground (Henry 1989), a band whose name is taken
from a masochistic text, and whose song ‘Venus in Furs’ invokes Sacher-Masoch’s
(1991) novel of the same title. In London, a decade later, it is Adam and the Ants
who bring punk’s masochistic imagery to the fore. Having abandoned his artcollege thesis in rubber and leather fetishism, Adam introduced S/M into his stage
performances with songs such as ‘Whip my Valise’ and ‘Rubber People’ (Home
1988; Sabin 1999). But what do bondage pants have to do with punk ‘identity’? Is
the correspondence between masochism and punk merely an accident of history?
Punk discourse is saturated with the language of both liberal humanism and
dialectical materialism, the radically autonomous individual who resists uniformity
and seizes the means of production. Described in this way, punk is merely the
logical extension of a (Western) metaphysics of selfhood. Masochism, on the other
hand, is first and foremost a psychoanalytic term, although Gilles Deleuze (1991)
returns this to its original literary context. Essentially a fetish of the skin, masochism places physical sensation (the coldness of marble, the interdependence of
pleasure and pain) above the metaphysical self. Through association, this extends
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Post-subcultures Reader
to a fixation in both the literature and in practice of ‘feelings’ (self-fulfilling
anxieties of abandonment), hair and clothing (leather and fur specifically), and the
apparent negation of the self through slavery and contractional obligation. This
means that psychoanalytic readings of masochism are not only determinist (in their
most simplistic and least satisfying interpretation) but also ‘superficial’ and ‘of the
surface’. Masochism and punk may meet in punk performance but they appear to
be philosophically incompatible. It is important to note that the perceived rift
between masochistic fashion and punk identity is therefore a problem of methodology and epistemology. For many, the question is not simply ‘why did/do some
punks wear bondage pants?’ but ‘is punk even quantifiable in this way?’
The purpose of this chapter is to reconcile the semiology of punk fashion,
specifically the use of sado/masochistic imagery and fetish wear, with the antiessentialist, anti-materialist arguments that have made themselves felt in normative
(post-)subcultural theory. I would argue that subcultural studies needs to reclaim
the superficial, or at least the epidermal, as its discursive domain. It is my contention
that punk and masochism are two expressions of the same phenomenon, the
defacement of the skin in its biological, psychological and sociological manifestations.
Epistemological Considerations: Interior and Exterior
There is a fundamental disparity between the ‘true’ inner self – the mind, soul or
spirit – and one’s physical body, which remains more or less constant throughout
the history of Western thought (Grosz 1995). Appearances are deemed deceiving;
the true self is concealed, rather than revealed, by the bodily self, and the skin in
particular. This is especially germane when considered alongside the racist pseudosciences of the turn of the last century, such as phrenology or social Darwinism,
which make simple correlations between a person’s appearance and his or her
biological or cultural essence. Indeed, the social hierarchies maintained by biological racism inevitably valorize the ‘higher races’ as spiritually and intellectually
superior, while at the same time condemning the ‘lower races’ for their extreme
physicality (Gilman 1991). The historical consequences of such discourses add a
moral imperative to the metaphysical separation of ‘true self’ from ‘bodily self’.
Moreover, it is the apparently superficial nature of masochism’s presence in
punk that frustrates a study such as this one. In the case of punk, identity is
increasingly located anywhere but the eye of the beholder (Sabin 1999), for
once you accept the fact that Sid and Siouxie wore swastikas because they weren’t Nazis,
the dresscode for the truly punk was clearly anything but pink hair, safety-pins and
bondage gear. The only acceptable function of fashion was the overthrow (for all time)
of the very metaphysics of ‘fashion’. (Sinker 1999: 125, emphasis added)
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‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’
This argument is phrased more strongly than most, but it marks out the sites of
conflict between different approaches to punk. On the one hand, it is ridiculous to
equate punk with ‘the overthrow . . . of the very metaphysics of fashion’. Punk is
most immediately identified as a set of stylistic and performative practices, not
least by those who may wish to be a part of it. On the other, it is just as problematic
to assert the presence of any one element in punk style, ‘pink hair, safety-pins and
bondage gear’, as correlative with punk identity, and any attempt to grasp punk
identity by its ‘uniformity’ is doomed to failure. This is particularly true in light of
current research that seeks to drive a wedge between the more visible elements of
subcultural identity and the values or pleasures that might be said to inform it (see
Andes 1998).
Removed from the domain of appearances, punk ceases to be a style and instead
becomes a group identity that, ironically, orients itself around radical individualism
(Muggleton 2000). In its extreme form, this radicalism sometimes manifests as a
social programme against corporate power, specifically those economic forces that
are believed to compromise individualism (Traber 2001). In this sense, triage
aesthetics and hastily photocopied fanzines are not the codified language of a
clandestine community, nor are they an historically determined cross-fertilization
of class and youth that seeks to reclaim the means of production, but the byproduct of a do-it-yourself philosophy of cultural manufacture. The problem with
this approach to subculture is that it is counter-intuitive and disingenuous; it risks
lapsing into Platonic idealism, which is just as removed from the punk experience
as that which it seeks to rectify. Although for many self-professed punks, the
visible element may be less important than the values ascribed to it, such an
approach can not explain subcultural affiliation except as a kind of spontaneous
‘punk-nature’ that wells up within the disenfranchized. There is no room for, as
Andes (1998) puts it, ‘growing up punk’, whereby a subculturalist finds the
conventions of punk useful as a framework for self-expression and self-becoming.
So we cannot do away with punk fashion in a study of punk identity, although
we must recognize the awkward logic that sutures the two. This discord stems in
part from what Elizabeth Grosz describes as a fundamental incompatibility between
two species of bodily knowledge:
The first conceives the body as a surface on which social law, morality and values are
inscribed; The second refers largely to the lived experience of the body, the body’s
internal or psychic inscription. Where the first analyses a social, public body, the second
takes the body-schema or imaginary anatomy as its object(s) . . . Where psychoanalysis
and phenomenology focus on the body as it is experienced and rendered meaningful, the
inscriptive model is more concerned with the processes by which the subject is marked,
scarred, transformed, and written upon or constructed by the various regimes of institutional, discursive, and nondiscursive power as a particular kind of body. (Grosz 1995:
33)
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Post-subcultures Reader
It seems obvious that style and collectivizing, material practices exist in the social
realm, whereas identity is a discourse of the interior. Of course, internally and
externally inscribed knowledges of the body are rhetorical extremes, and Grosz’s
article is as much about shifting disciplinary walls as the lacunae between interior
and exterior. Nonetheless, anthropological ethnography does not accord with
Grosz’s internally inscriptive model in the same manner that, say, ethological
studies or clinical psychoanalysis might. Rather, a closer analysis reveals that in
practice these orientations are reversed. ‘Identity’, as a mutable process by which
one navigates and mediates the external world, is the subject of ethnographic
research. Culture is therefore identity on a collective level. The subject of classical
psychoanalysis is also ‘identity’, but identity as ego-formation (or ‘ego-maintenance’) and how this manifests in (aberrant) social behaviour. Culture is the
collective manifestation of identity. The difference between the two is subtle but
significant.
Ethnographic testimony provides data for the analysis of the individual as part
of a social network. By contrast, psychoanalytic case studies provide the researcher
with information regarding the individual case and his or her self-inscription
through the material base of the body, which is a given biological fact and informs
all subsequent psychological development. The materiality of the body produces,
rather than receives, knowledges of the social. The ethnographer looks for correspondence within and between communities, the practising psychoanalyst attempts
to correct aberrations of psychological development on an individual basis.
Whereas the ethnographer participates in order to experience the social context of
the subject’s body, the practising psychoanalyst provides a context for the subject
within which he or she (the subject) will be able to untangle the threads of his or
her experience. In other words, we might say that classical psychoanalysis seeks
objective knowledge of the interior subject, whereas anthropological ethnography
seeks a subjective knowledge of the exterior object (or subject, in the Foucauldian
sense of the word).
In most cases, and with good reason, the fruits of ethnographic research are
removed from their psycho-biological bases, except where the body is understood
as it is inscribed from without. The sociopolitical basis of cultural studies means
that there is an overwhelming tendency to place subcultural identity within a
discursive framework of social forces and external inscription. Conversely, the
readerly, textual basis of French semiotics (after Barthes and before Baudrillard),
as reinterpreted by the CCCS, locates style and socio-political practice firmly
within the body of the subject.
Punk certainly lends itself to an external discourse of social struggle and
ideological resistance. Although deviance plays an important role in the theoretical
framework of the Chicago School, it is Dick Hebdige’s use of punk as the exemplar
of subcultural identity that has cements the ‘subcultural’ into a wider social
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‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’
dynamic of class conflict. The moral panics that surround punk’s earliest appearances in the mass media and the subcultural resistance theory of Hebdige can be
said to share a certain dialectical synchronicity. Both position punk as ‘noise . . .
interference in the orderly sequence’ that governs high-culturally sanctioned mass
communication (Hebdige 1979: 90). Accordingly, the ‘sub’ in subculture has come
to signal the subaltern, rather than simply a smaller subset of a wider social grouping.
Within this context, the more visible, stylistic practices of punk are read as iconoclastic and defiant when considered alongside ‘mainstream’ dress codes.
Psychoanalytic masochism belongs to the other kind of bodily inscription.
Although masochistic desire can only be satiated or observed in the social realm
of the exterior, it is generally assumed that this desire stems from a particular
psychological state that inscribes the body from the interior. This then manifests on
the exterior. So, the prevalence in sadomasochistic literature of leather and fur,
particularly when worn over naked flesh, suggests a skin that has been flayed by
a hunter and then turned into a garment (Anzieu 1989). Torn clothing and leather
jackets, common signifiers of punk subculture, can thus be syncretized with the
more functional trappings of masochistic sexuality, such as bruised skin and
bondage pants. However, such a semiotic approach is no longer considered an
appropriate methodology for subcultural analysis. In particular, it does not appear
to privilege an internal discourse of the body at all. So far as any ‘interior’ world
analysed through visual style is really a socially experienced one, rather than an
objectified one, it is thus (in our terminology here) an exterior, rather than interior,
analysis.
There is a contrary tendency in some contemporary texts to separate punk
‘essence’ out from its easily imitated physical manifestations. These texts tend to
be written in a more testimonial or journalistic style located outside the traditional
conventions of academic writing, and Mark Sinker’s (1999) piece is an important
example. I have already discussed the philosophical shortcomings of such an
argument, but find it difficult to incorporate into my analysis here except to say that
these texts might have more in common with the arguments put forward by the
CCCS, principally Hebdige’s thesis of diffusion, than it would first appear.
To summarize, it is difficult to explain the masochistic presence in punk style
as having significant bearing on punk identity because of a basic incongruity
between the interior and exterior realms within which punk operates. I now turn
my attention to that metaphorical surface upon which interior and exterior knowledges of the body are etched – a surface that, like a translucent sheet of paper, is
two sided yet not separable into two distinct halves. Reclaiming the superficial for
subcultural analysis necessitates a psychosocial analysis of the skin and its various
psychosocial manifestations.
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Post-subcultures Reader
Skin: Beyond Interiority and Exteriority
From an epidemiological perspective, the methodological and epistemological
problem posed by the conflict between style and identity can be mediated through
the same logic that gives meaning to the skin, as a psychosocial membrane that
connects internal and external inscriptions of the body. As the site of both individuation and interpersonal communication, the skin is the primary locus of subcultural
identity, the organ through which one tries to ‘fit in and yet stand out’ (Muggleton
2000: Chapter 4).
Drawing on ethological studies, psychoanalytic theory and his own experience
as a practising psychoanalyst, Didier Anzieu links the development of the Ego to
an infant’s discovery of its own skin. He argues that the child experiences its skin
as a two-sided envelope: the outer porous layer is protective and sensory whereas
the smooth inner layer contains the body (Anzieu 1989). Together, the interior and
exterior surfaces of the skin form a communicative interface between the interior
and exterior worlds of the subject, between a perceived ‘inner self’ and the socially
perceptive schema of the exterior (Anzieu 1989; Gell 1993).
This becomes more apparent when one considers the ways in which we manipulate our appearance in order to affect these transmissions:
Decorating, covering, uncovering or otherwise altering the human form in accordance
with social notions of everyday propriety or sacred dress, beauty, solemnity, status or
changes in status, or on occasion of the violation or inversion of such notions, seems to
have been a concern of every human society of which we have knowledge . . . the surface
of the body seems everywhere to be treated, not only as the boundary of the individual
as a biological and psychological entity, but as the frontier of the social self as well.
(Turner 1980: 112)
Unlike our other sensory organs, we have relatively little control over how our skin
functions. Skin covers the entire body, and so cannot be turned off in the same way
that one’s eyes can be closed or one’s ears stopped up. Clothing, hair and body
modification are the technologies through which one can take a measure of control
over these functions of the skin. They are therefore as much implicated in the
expression of agency and self-determination as they are rooted in social expectation and the accruement of cultural capital. Drawing on his experiences with the
Kayapo in the Amazon Forest, Turner (1980) argues that body painting can perform
the same social functions as casual and ceremonial dress (including cosmetics,
coiffure, piercings and other related practices of body modification) in Western
societies. By drawing attention to the limits of the physiological self, at the same
time concealing those elements such as the genitals that are considered to reveal
the pre-social or natural self, dress represents the skin in a way that the skin cannot
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‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’
possibly do on its own. Belonging in both the psychological and social worlds, the
skin needs a synthetic buffer zone that will perform its exterior functions without
inhibiting its interior processes.
Alfred Gell (1993) takes Anzieu’s psychobiological arguments about skin, and
projects them onto the social realm of body modification. In particular, Gell is
interested in ‘social reproduction’, the way in which a culture reproduces itself
across subsequent generations. He describes this process as a ‘network of agentive
relations’ that is not a matter of mapping a Xerox copy of the self onto one’s
cultural offspring. Rather, social reproduction entails the adoption of the responsibilities of cultural reproduction by a new generation ‘who have all the attributes
(moral qualities, status attributes, possessions, titles etc.) they ideally should
have’ (Gell 1993). Whereas Anzieu is a psychoanalyst, Gell is an anthropologist.
His breach of the interior/exterior divide may be termed anaclitic. In Freud’s
terminology, anaclisis (‘reclining’) refers to the attachment of the subject to an
object-choice that that is reminiscent of his or her mother or father (Freud 1953).
Structurally, this also provides psychoanalysis with a strategy for depicting psychic
development as ‘leaning back’ on the physiological life it has left behind, without
simply dissolving the distinction between them. This relationship is not exactly
metaphoric, which would suggest an internal inscription, as it reflects a developmental progression that can be used to reconcile differences, rather than a static
substitution intended to reveal similarities. Neither is anaclisis metonymic, as it is
develops from tangible, sensory data, precluding the endless leap ‘from signifier
to signifier, without any reference to a signified’ (Handelman 1982). Rather,
psychic life is an extension of physical life, an ‘increasing complexity in the service
of the satisfaction of vital needs’ (Anzieu 1989).
As psychic systems develop, they become increasingly abstracted from the
physical systems upon which they are based, until that relationship is more one of
structural resemblance than stimulus-response. There remain traces of connectivity
(the distinction between the two sets of systems is never really complete), and so
we are able to elaborate upon a psychic system with reference to the physiological
phase of development in which it developed. The psychic and the physiological
break off from each other into parallel discourses, except where pathologies of the
psyche manifest physiological symptoms. The brain ‘outgrows’ the body, but never
leaves it entirely.
The epidemiologies of Didier Anzieu (1989), Terence Turner (1980) and Alfred
Gell (1993) map out a network of anaclitic relationships between the communal
and the personal that befits the interrelation of style and individuality particular to
subcultural identity. It will now be necessary to specify the ways in which punk
and masochism are both specifically epidermal practices, and how individuation
and collectivism might be allowed to exist simultaneously through the same
medium.
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Post-subcultures Reader
Margins and Limits
A collective identity is something inherently sexual, in the manner theorized (if not
abstracted) by Bataille (2001); it entails the transcendence (and loss) of the self into
something transmissive and transgressive, both comforting as the womb and
undesirable as death. Just as Acker’s (1984) narrator is interpolated into the
subterranean sub-urban through the resounding ‘boomp boomp boomp’ of the
punk club, eliciting a confusion of subjectivity, the ‘youth subculture’/‘parent
culture’ dyad is fraught with anxieties over communal identity and radical autonomy. This manifests in two ways. The first is the abject or limit case, the identity
that sits on the skin. Abject identities are radically individual, and therefore suit
punk’s meta-narrative of social autonomy. The other part of this dynamic entails
a rending of that skin.
In Acker’s (1984) text, punk and masochism are parallel gestures towards urban
maggot-hood, a self-deprecating group identity that thrives in the subcultural
compost beneath the veneer of civilization. Their horizontal, writhing gestures,
ostensibly the ecstatic energies of a punk audience, also evokes the blind urgency
of a sexual compulsion. This compulsion appears bestial, abhuman:
the abject confronts us . . . with those fragile states where man strays on the territories
of animal. Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area
of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism,
which were imagined as representatives of sex or murder. (Kristeva 1982: 12–13)
The animalism of CBGB’s punk patrons places them on the margins of social life,
and necessarily so; no matter how mistaken its disavowal of commercialization,
punk resists mass production. Blatant attempts to commodify the punk ‘look’, or
even for an individual to adopt a particular style without sufficient authentication,
risk spectacular failure. (This is despite the poverty of theories of subcultural
commitment and authenticity as philosophical axioms.) Linda Andes, for example,
notes that her informants ‘not only said that they felt that punk was becoming
trendy; they all said that this happened after they became involved, regardless of
when that involvement took place within the history of the subculture’ (Andes
1998: 219; emphasis in original).
By disavowing their own punk development, Andes’s subjects are able to reinforce their ‘innate’ authenticity. Andes’s model is simplistic in its linearity, and no
doubt simplified for the forum in which it is published, but it makes the important
point that commitment and authenticity are rhetorical modes used to demarcate
punk as a cultural ‘alternative’. However, as David Muggleton has pointed out,
commitment and authenticity in this sense do not indicate ‘an objective . . .
subcultural stratification’ of subcultural identity as a whole (Muggleton 2000).
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‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’
Rather, these terms are used to differentiate between ‘core’ and ‘marginalized’
members of a particular subcultural community. What is significant about these
terms is the way in which they are used to demonstrate one’s marginality, or
abjection, from a perceived cultural mainstream.
Social, political and biological abjection is an integral part of punk’s (limited)
public image, what Daniel S. Traber (2001) describes as the ‘sub-urban’ and its
corresponding rhetoric of self-marginalization. Punk names itself as the waste and
excrescence of the post-industrial world. Whether disaffected or angry at being
excluded, punk youth seemingly place themselves outside the parent culture as
‘Other’. However, the rhetoric of abjection is imprecise. Traber’s White, privileged
punks are able to slip into an ‘authentic’ sub-urban lifestyle, and therefore not
really slip at all, precisely because their Californian Whiteness affords them a
degree of social mobility. That is not to credit Whiteness with an essential malleability, but to bring the ‘social conditions’ of punk back to a tangible discourse of
social embodiment. Ultimately, self-marginalization, ‘silence[s] the marginal
subject’s own viewpoint on marginality. By proposing that they have joined a
different cultural formation by adopting a certain lifestyle, punks further naturalize
that subject position in a binary relationship to suburban life that is also (re)naturalized. The power of Whiteness is recentered and buttressed as the norm’
(Traber 2001: 54). My point is not that punk is inherently conservative or a magical
solution to the problems of disenfranchisement but that the abject (or marginal)
does not truly exist as outside the parent culture. Rather, it is as a limit case, or
along the skin of the parent culture, that subculture operates.
In masochism, too, abjection is a performative practice. The sexualized ego is
itself made abject, but seemingly in a way that threatens the ego’s integrity:
The function of individuation of the Self can only be accomplished through suffering
both physical (the tortures) and moral (the humiliations); the systematic introduction of
inorganic substances under the skin, the ingestion of repugnant substances (urine, the
partner’s excrement) reveal the fragility of that function; the distinguishing of his own
body from those of others is constantly being put into question. (Anzieu 1989: 10)
Whereas punk appears to break away from the parent culture and posit itself as an
‘Other’, it seems that masochism seeks the submission of the self to the ‘Other’.
According to Deleuze (1991), however, the masochist invites the physical subjugation of his or her body in order to counteract his or her moral subjugation at the
hands of the superego. Contradicting Freud, Deleuze argues that the masochist
exorcizes his or her superego, rather than submitting to it, by bestowing it upon an
external party. Thus at the end of Venus in Furs, Sacher-Masoch’s protagonist
‘cures’ himself of his own morality and turns to beating women, rather than asking
to be beaten by them (Deleuze 1991; Sacher-Masoch 1991).
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Post-subcultures Reader
Tears and Bruises
The abject confronts us, on the other hand, and this time within our personal archaeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before existing outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking
away, with constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as secure as it is
stifling. (Kristeva 1982: 13)
As with authenticity and commitment, the desire to ‘resist’ must be maintained in
a comprehensive theory of subculture, more for its importance as an interior strategy
for making the punk body meaningful than for its ability to tell us about sociopolitical ‘reality’. Removed from hegemonic Marxism and incorporated into an
epidemiologically abject discourse, subcultural resistance becomes a necessary
condition of youth, as a catalyst for intergenerational cultural transmission.
Gell (1993) sees agency itself as pivotal to cultural reproduction – cultural
offspring must be social actors to fulfil their responsibilities. Without agency, the
parent culture stalls and dies. Ironically, this need for one’s cultural offspring to
stand on his or her own two feet as an independent cultural agent can only be
achieved, in part, through rebellion, a refusal to submit to the will of that prior
generation. The rhetoric of death, struggle and apocalypse serve to mark out the
liminal spaces of the parent culture, scarifying the social epidermis to reify its
borders, not to rupture them.
In The Skin Ego, Didier Anzieu (1989) argues that it is through a tactile relationship with the parent that the child is imbued with a sense of security and the limits
of the self. The ‘shared skin’ of the mother-child dyad, prefigured by the womb,
provides the infant with comfort and support, in order to build the self-confidence
necessary for autonomous life, but it is also a constraint that prevents that autonomy from functioning effectively. As the child matures and seeks to forge a
separate identity to the ‘mother’, he or she must slowly tear away the imaginary
membrane that joins them. This process is painful and traumatic for both parties,
achieved only through continual recourse to the security of the shared skin.
Anzieu pathologizes sadomasochistic practice to a degree that is not helpful
here. What we can take from his work, however, is the perverse relationship
between sadomasochism and autonomy: masochism as the expression of a frustrated
will to autonomy, rather than a desire for submission, as one might presume. By
damaging or staining the skin, the self can hope to attain ‘omnipotence in destruction’
(Anzieu 1989), thereby reclaiming it for the self (Rosenblatt 1997). Connections
may therefore be drawn between masochistic discourse and the ripped aesthetics
identified with the wider punk scene. This relationship is anaclitic, rather than
semiotic, and evinces a direct relationship between the radical individualism of
punk testimony and the group identity of punk social praxis.
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In different contexts, punk fashion, as a popular form of epidermal defacement,
can lend a synthetic toughness to one’s skin – what Alfred Gell (1993) calls
‘character armour’, or provide a comforting blanket of familiarity. The primary
biological functions of the skin are augmented by its scarification, as if through
sympathetic magic. Knives, fragments and incisions predominate in Acker’s
(1984) description. The libidinal drives of the nightclub’s patrons spill out from
their wounds. Like worms, they can only reproduce ‘if you cut [them] apart with
a knife’ (Acker 1984: 120). It is the cut, or rather the omnipresent threat of cutting
inherent in scarification, that sutures punk into masochism and vice versa.
The distinction between an actual cut, and the threat of a cut, is an important one
to make. In his reading of masochistic testimony and literature, Didier Anzieu
(1989) emphasizes the importance of ‘marking’ the skin with a whip or brand, that
the sensation felt by the skin be validated through a sense of visual permanency.
The skin is injured by the lash in such a way as to reify its surface. Masochistic
sexuality makes a fetish of the skin, infusing it with idolatrous power, and granting
it an excess of visibility through tearing, bruising or piercing. Michael Taussig
(1999) has observed this same process at work in the ‘defacement’ of public
monuments and artworks, or in the explosive significance of cinematic montage
and its symbolic presence in the motif of the ruptured eye. He writes, ‘the statue
barely exists for consciousness and perhaps is nonexistent – until it receives a
shock to its being, provided by its defacement issuing forth a hemorrhage of sacred
force. With defacement, the statue moves from an excess of invisibility to an
excess of visibility’ (Taussig 1999: 52). Following Taussig, defacement is not a
process of obliteration, but of a sacrilegious/sacrificial scarification that draws
attention to the surface of things, to the skin in all its communicative power.
The accoutrements of Punk – torn clothing, torn skin, fetish gear, leaking
bodies, sharp hair, social aggression and an aesthetics of sensory indiscrimination
– are a concerted attack on the psycho-biological skin, as much as the social skin.
This scarification is part of the quest for radical autonomy, which operates on an
individual and a communal level simultaneously. Through a defacement of the
excrescences of the body, mirrored by a parallel scarification of the social structures and interstitial spaces within which it perceives itself to be located, punk
enacts all the anxieties and pleasures of youth as a liminal condition caught
between generations. The deployment of cut-up aesthetics, torn clothes and the
trappings of masochism work in concert with the will to radical independence that
saturates the punk ethos.
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Post-subcultures Reader
References
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Anzieu, D. (1989), The Skin Ego: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Self, New
Haven CT: Yale University Press.
Bataille, G. (2001), Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, London: Penguin.
Deleuze, G. (1991), ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty
& Venus in Furs (translated by J. McNeil), New York: Zone Books.
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